The present invention relates generally to the field of telecommunications application platforms or servers and more specifically to providing a gateway access server that provides telephony services and information retrieval service over a voice over IP (VOIP) network without using any hardware cards commonly referred to as TICs (Telephony Interface Cards), and which is scalable to handle many users simultaneously.
Telecommunication application servers that provide telephony services and information retrieval service are known, however most of them use traditional PSTN (Public Switch Telephony Network) infrastructure to provide such service using various types of signaling mechanisms like T1, E1, SS7, etc.
Most recently there are some systems that provide similar service over the voice over IP (VOIP) networks. All of these systems use telephony interface cards to connect to either the PSTN or the VOIP network. An overview of a typical system is depicted in FIG. 1.
There are other systems that provide limited functionality like PC to PC and PC to phone communication services using software only model. However, these systems are not scalable because they perform transcode operation using the software model.
Transcoding is the process of converting one voice data format to another. All of the existing systems interact with the VOIP network using network supported CODEC format like G723.1 or G729 etc., however they perform a transcode operation on the data to convert it into either standard PCM, Mu-LAW and/or A-LAW before the application can handle the data. The cost of a phone call on a PSTN costs about 7 to 10 cents a minute, while the cost of a phone call on a VoIP network has been reduced to about 1 cent a minute. Transcoding is a computationally intensive operation required to be done by a special hardware device called a TIC (Telephony Interface Cards) for scalability reasons. When transcoding is done in software the system is not scalable because the transcoding operation ties up large amounts of resources. There are also systems that perform transcoding in a batch mode in a non real-time basis, i.e. offline batch processing. However, this approach does not provide instant/real-time access to information until the transcode operation is complete. In some of the systems the message store stores multiple formats of the same data, one format for the VOIP/PSTN network and another format for access through the web. However such systems are either storage intensive, CPU intensive, or non-real-time oriented and cannot scale to a very large user base nor be used to provide synchronized data between the web and the telephone network.
Web portals, such as Yahoo, the assignee of the present application, receive millions of visits per day. Accordingly, standard VoIP interfacing techniques such as TICs or software transcoding add cost and complexity to implementing telephony access to services normally provided by a web browser. As is well-known, revenue generation in e-commerce is often not linked to the services provided, so the cost of providing these services must be carefully controlled. On the other hand the mobility and availability of telephones to potential visitees provides a tremendous business opportunity.
Because of the above constraints, a telecommunications application server that provides functionalities like unified messaging, voice portal access to information, and communication services must use specialized hardware such as TICs. Using specialized hardware limits the server to being developed only on a platform running operating system supported by the hardware vendor. Building such a scalable application server on a platform running an operating system like Free BSD UNIX that is not supported by the hardware vendor is not possible. Further, the cost of using TICs makes the cost of implementing such a telecommunications application server prohibitive.
From the above, it is apparent that improved systems which provide telephone access to various services now provided by the internet are needed.